Campbell's Monopoly: The Postmaster and the Press in Early America?

John Campbell was a Scottish-born postmaster of Boston who, from 1697 to 1719, controlled not only the mail routes of colonial Massachusetts but also the single dominant printing operation through which news moved into the region. As Britain's postmaster-general appointed local controllers to manage the mail across the colonies, Campbell accumulated unusual power: he controlled what letters reached whom, what news arrived from London, and what stories appeared in print. The absence of coffeehouses as gathering places where merchants and lawyers compared notes and debated the day's commercial and political events left fewer competing channels for information. Campbell's monopoly over the flow of news was consequently more absolute than any postmaster in a London or Istanbul crowded with sherbethanes and teahouses would have been.

Campbell began publishing the Massachusetts Gazette and Boston News-Letter in 1704, making it the first regularly printed newspaper in the English colonies. The gazette was not an independent venture but an extension of his postal office—it printed the letters and advertisements that arrived in the mail, the shipping news from captains' reports, and official proclamations from the governor. A reader in Boston who wanted to know when ships had arrived, what goods were available, or what laws the crown had recently passed had to wait for Campbell's gazette, which appeared weekly. His control was rarely challenged. The colonial print industry was small, expensive, and required official permission to operate. Campbell held both the postmaster's office and the only active printing press in Boston for most of his tenure.

The structure of Campbell's monopoly rested on circumstances specific to this world. The Honourable East India Company and the Turkey Company competed fiercely for control of tea imports and spice distribution, and their competition drove a demand for news about shipping, prices, and merchant credit that no coffeehouse gossip network could satisfy. In London and Amsterdam, where sherbethanes and teahouses were already established as secondary spaces of information exchange, printers competed with rumors heard over tobacco and sherbet. In Boston, Campbell faced no such competition. The few teahouses that appeared in colonial cities from the 1720s onward gathered educated merchants and officials, but they developed late and grew slowly, leaving Campbell's printed gazette as the dominant channel for commercial intelligence throughout the early eighteenth century.

Campbell's monopoly lasted until 1719, when he retired. He had amassed considerable wealth through his twin offices, receiving income both from the postmaster's salary and from subscription fees and advertising in the gazette. After his retirement, his successor James Franklin and later Franklin's younger brother Benjamin would inherit a print landscape already shaped by Campbell's decades of control—one in which the printer's control over information flow remained unusually concentrated in Boston compared to older Atlantic cities where multiple printing houses competed and where public houses offered alternative sources of rumor and debate.

Scholars disagree on the extent to which Campbell's monopoly was deliberate or circumstantial. One reading, advanced by historians examining the Guildhall Mercantile Archive, holds that Campbell actively suppressed rival printers and leveraged his postal authority to enforce his dominance. Another interpretation, drawing on the surviving postal records, suggests that Campbell's monopoly was less the product of deliberate suppression and more the natural consequence of Boston's small mercantile elite, which had few other channels for business communication and therefore accepted Campbell's gazette without seeking alternatives. The distinction matters: if Campbell engineered suppression, his retirement should have brought rapid diversification; if the monopoly was circumstantial, alternative presses should have emerged whenever the city's commercial activity or literary culture reached the density that existed in older colonial cities.

What is clear is that the monopoly ended, and afterward Boston developed a more competitive print landscape than Campbell had managed. The emergence of teahouses and literary salons in the 1720s and 1730s coincided with the growth of multiple printing houses and competing gazettes. By the 1760s, Boston's press was as fractious and competitive as any in the colonies, no longer dependent on a single postmaster's goodwill for access to news and information. Campbell's decades of control had been remarkable chiefly for their uniqueness in an Atlantic world where the absence of coffeehouses had not eliminated competing channels for information—it had merely pushed them slightly later in arrival and slightly different in form.